Against the Current 180

DONALD TRUMP’S CALL to ban Muslims from entering the United States set off a political and media firestorm that’s raging as we go to press. But Trump’s latest outrage essentially lit the match to underbrush that was ready to be ignited. Trump himself is not so important — a vicious demagogue, but not a mass organizer or leader. What matters, following the carnage of the “Islamic State” attack in Paris and the San Bernardino mass shooting, is the climate in...

HISTORICALLY, THE PRIMARY targets of bigotry and domestic terrorism in the United States have been Black people, who were considered less than human and definitely not as equals to whites. Native peoples were slaughtered by the settler colonists, removed from their tribal lands and put on “reservations.” Native Americans to this day suffer from the original genocidal crimes of the European colonists.Today’s rightwing bigotry and quasi-populist appeals are based on an extension...

“I’M SORRY. “ CHICAGO Mayor Rahm Emanuel uttered those two words December 9 that few elected politicians ever say.His mea culpa, however, was not genuine. It occurred after mass protests demanding justice for Laquan McDonald, forcing the Cook County prosecutor to release a video showing the cop murder of McDonald. For 13 months the “Blue wall” of silence, the county prosecutor and mayor had joined together to hide the video and the truth.The next day “dozens...

THE 2015 UAW/Big Three contracts took 67 days and multiple attempts to ratify, resulting in what most autoworkers see as a partial victory.After confidently strutting during last summer’s bargaining convention, the UAW leadership never attempted to organize workers for a contract campaign. Having suspended their right to strike at the time of the 2008-09 financial crisis, GM and Chrysler/Fiat (FCA) workers were able to rejoin Ford workers this time around in being able to utilize their...

HOUSED IN A time-worn but once-elegant villa in Budapest, the Applied Arts Museum collection includes pieces from Iran, Syria and other Middle-Eastern regions. In one room on the top floor, the collection includes two wooden panels from Syria: windows. Folk-art designs cover finely but simply constructed frames, cut and joined out of cedar. Above the window openings are hand-painted scenes of Syrian village life, peaceful and thriving.If these windows somehow found their way back home today the...

CALIFORNIA HAS WHAT’S called a Mediterranean climate, which means it has two seasons, wet and dry.The wet one usually starts in November and lasts through the winter and early spring and is characterized by rain, and snow in the northern part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In the dry season, from mid-spring through October, there is little or no rain.In recent years the wet season has become shorter and with less rain and snow, while the dry one has lengthened and grown hotter. This...

Capitalism & Climate Change:The Science and Politics of Global WarmingBy David Klein, illustrated and editedby Stephanie McMillanAn ebook available for download at Gumroad, a site where people can sell their work directly to their audience: https://gumroad.com/l/climatechange#. You choose your own price.MOST BOOKS ON ecosocialism, while they may be of interest to those who already know something about socialism, especially those who already are socialists, are not particularly useful...

[Author’s content warning: This text includes a certain amount of Keynes-bashing. Readers who find this offensive may take comfort from the Marxist self-critique offered at the end.]NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM TODAY has become unpopular, but imagining alternatives is difficult nonetheless.During the 1980s and 1990s, the glitzy world of big money impressed not only people who were invested in it, but even many who were increasingly indebted to or sidelined by it. Even those who didn’t...

THIS PROJECT BEGAN in the Shaker Heights, Ohio of my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s. A self-consciously liberal, affluent and integrated inner-ring suburb, Shaker Heights was known for its good schools, winding streets and anti-white-flight programs: low-interest loans designed to integrate neighborhoods, robust busing, and ordinances against blockbusting. But the city’s liberalism and its pro-integration policies did not eliminate segregation or stratification, even locally. In spite of...

THREE DECADES AGO The New York Times Book Review observed, “Mary Helen Washington has had a greater impact on the canon of Afro-American Literature than has any other scholar.” The occasion was the arrival of yet another in her acclaimed quartet of editions of creative writing by African-American women.Since then, Dr. Washington has only intensified her dedication to rebalance historical perspective and restore visibility through a miraculous retrieval of the radical Black past in...

The Black Cultural Front:Black Writers and Artists of the Depression GenerationBy Brian DolinarJackson: University Press of Mississippi, Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies, 2012/2014, 288 pages, $60 hardback, $27 paperback.BRIAN DOLINAR WANTS to know when and whether African-American cultural workers were able to combine politics and popular culture. A tantalizing conclusion to The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation treats...

F.B. Eyes:How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American LiteratureBy William J. MaxwellPrinceton University Press, NJ, 2015, 384 pages, $29.95 hardcover.THE GREAT CONTRIBUTION of this book by William J. Maxwell, associate professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, is its documentation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s practice of monitoring, disrupting, infiltrating, intimidating and occasionally indicting the...

AHMAD RAHMAN, AN educator and activist who served almost 22 years in a Michigan prison and subsequently became the 2013 Michigan Council for Social Studies “College Professor of the Year,” died unexpectedly on September 21, 2015 at the age of 64.Just two months later, on November 29 Ron Scott, a leading activist of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality and its neighborhood “Peace Zones for Life,” died of cancer at age 68.Both had been members of the Black...

In SolidarityEssays on Working-Class Organization in the United StatesBy Kim MoodyHaymarket Books, 2014, 332 pages + notes and index, $22 paperback.IN THE SUMMER of 2000, the Solidarity National Office mailed me a copy of Kim Moody’s new essay “The Rank-and-File Strategy: Building a Socialist Movement in the United States.” I sat for hours on my couch, reading and studying this pamphlet that would change my life.Moody asked why socialists today are so isolated from...

Haunted by Hitler:Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United StatesBy Christopher VialsAmherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014, 280 pages,$26.95 paperback.BACK IN THE day, a dear friend of mine newly intrigued with the program of the Black Panther Party firmly declared to a group of us that he was against racism and fascism. He pronounced the latter term face-ism, instead of rhyming it with hashism, something with which a few members of our group...

Lineages of the Literary Left:Essays in Honor of Alan M. WaldEdited by Howard Brick, Robbie Lieberman and Paula RabinowitzAnn Arbor: Michigan Publishing/Maize Books, 2014, 377 pages, $37.50 paperback.THE “FESTSCHRIFT” SEEMS to belong to a vanishing scholarly past, as distant in the twenty-first century, at least in U.S. intellectual culture, as the manual typewriter and library card-catalogue. It was a tradition where scholars grown ancient in the classroom and their musty...

Eugene V. Debs ReaderSocialism and the Class StruggleEdited by William A. Pelz with a new introduction by Mark Lause, and an original introduction by Howard Zinn,London: Merlin Press, 2014, 256 pages, $25 paperback.THIS NEW RELEASE of selected writings and speeches by Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926) could not be more timely. It’s especially salient for those on the socialist left engaged in discussions and debates regarding Bernie Sanders’ bid to win the Democratic Party...

To The Masses:Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921Edited and translated by John RiddellBrill, 2015, 1299 pages, $517 hardcover.IN LATE JUNE 1921, the Third Congress of the Communist International convened amidst great confusion and contradictory impulses within the international workers’ movement.Soviet Russia had just emerged victorious from a protracted civil war against imperialist-sponsored forces of reaction. In the wake of this victory, however,...

How does ecosocialist politics differ from traditional socialist and labor politics? How do we ensure the generalized satisfaction of needs for all, including the equalization of living standards between the industrialized nations and the rest of the world, if humanity can no longer afford to keep expanding production based on energy from fossil fuels?

In 2014 Solidarity’s Ecosocialist Working Group began a project to discuss these and related questions. We publish three essays here as the beginning of a working paper exchanging ideas, proposals, and possible strategic frameworks. We also invite your comments.